The
most remarkable single thing about the Tennessee Valley Authority,
John Gunther wrote in 1947, is, in a way, the quality of its
acceptance It is an accomplished fact, it works, and it
works superbly well.

The
TVA Idea

Blunt
and outspoken, travel writer John Gunther had a habit of letting the chips
fall where they may. His tough talk may even have won him a place on a
Nazi hit list. But when it came to TVA, he purred like a kitten.

Quite possibly
the TVA idea is the greatest single American invention of this century,
the biggest contribution the United States has yet made to society
in
the modern world.

Thats a bolder
statement than were likely to hear even from people who work for
TVA. But, as it happens, no one paid John Gunther to say that in his best-selling
book Inside USA, published in 1947.

The
Watts Bar Steam Plant, pictured in John Gunthers booklet The
Story of TVA.

Gunther, in fact,
was an independent journalist with a cynical streak, and no pushover.
A decade earlier hed ignored death threats from Hitlers secret
police to write his famous Nazi-era exposé Inside Europe.

When Gunther spoke
of the modern world, he knew what he was talking about. It
was said that the Chicago-born writer had crossed more borders and
interviewed more statesmen than any journalist of his time.

And he was awed by
TVA.

Gunther may be best
known today as the author of Death Be Not Proud, a painful
memoir of his teenage sons death of cancer. He also wrote several
novels, but in the 30s and 40s, his work set the standard
for personal travel writing.

Gunthers books
Inside Europe (1936) and The High Cost of Hitler (1939)
gave many Americans their first glimpse of just how bad things had gotten
in Nazi Germany. They say that the SS marked him for death.
After that, most of his books were Book-of-the-Month Club bestsellers.

So American readers
held their breath when they heard that John Gunther was turning his unblinking
gaze on his own country. In the mid-40s he traveled throughout
America, researching his next major book.

By May 1945, when
he arrived in the Tennessee Valley, he was so famous that as he interviewed
local people for Inside USA, local people interviewed him.
His comments made the regional newspapers, and all he seemed to want
to
talk about was TVA.

In The Story of TVA, Gunther quoted J.W. Shouse of Hickman
County, Tennessee: We get more for our money out of electricity
than anything we spend for it.

The public corporation
was 12 years old, at the end of its dramatic period of massive dam-building,
and long past its dreamy utopian beginnings. But John Gunther still
thought
that the reality of public-private cooperation centering on a shared
river valley was just about the best thing hed ever come across.

I consider
it to be the single most indispensable thing to see in the U.S. It shows
the world of tomorrow as against the world of yesterday I cant
say how much Ive been impressed by this experiment hereIve
been inspired. Ive seen something that should strike deep into
the heart of every American.

His book included
an entire chapter on the agency, Model TVA. In it he repeatedly
quotes Chairman David Lilienthal, whom Gunther admired and befriended,
and praised TVAs efficiency and morale.

His conclusions are
poignant: The future of TVA is of course more TVAs,
he wrote. We have talked about the Columbia and the Missouri [Rivers];
an even more pressing case [for development] might be made for the Arkansas
The range of the concept is indeed almost boundless; it knows
no barriers except the selfishness of man, and its horizon could be illimitable.

Inside USA
was not only an American bestseller when it came out in the spring of
1947, but a worldwide sensation translated into many languages. The great
novelist Sinclair Lewis called it the richest treasure house of
facts about America that has ever been published, and probably the most
spirited and interesting. Somehow it even spawned a Broadway play.

Gunthers judgment
of the importance of TVA is evident in the fact that the only published
excerpt from his most famous Inside book was an illustrated
booklet called The Story of TVA. From his office in New York,
Gunther continued to take a particular interest in the agency. At times
he was a fierce advocate for it during the postwar years, when suspicious
politicians were arguing that the New Deal holdover should be dismantled.

Although he was occupied
with other projects, including a travel book about life behind the Iron
Curtain and his wrenching memoir about his son, Gunther kept rooting
for
TVA. In 1951 he wrote to TVA Chairman Gordon Clapp, offering to help
arrange visits to the agency by UN delegates. His booklet on TVA was
being published
in new editions as late as 1953, six years after the publication of Inside
USA.

Some 30 years after
Gunthers death, Inside USA has not been forgotten. There
was a good deal of retrospective discussion of the book at its 50th anniversary
in 1997; the renewed interest led to a new edition, published internationally
by New Press. Included, of course, is the chapter about TVAstill
inspiring in the 21st century, as Gunther, the hard-nosed visionary,
would
have wished it to be.

After all, what impressed
him most about TVA was its bottom line. TVA, he wrote, proves that
the idea of unified development works, that national resources can be
developed with politics excluded and without prejudice to private enterprise.

It can be done.
What more should one legitimately ask?

Name
that artifact

The
TVA Historic Collection includes a host of items that reflect
the technological advances of the 20th century. Can you identify
this artifact from the TVA collection?